How I Replaced My Son’s PC With an £88 iMac
I recently replaced my son's broken PC with a 2015 iMac from eBay. Here's how it went...
A year or so ago, my wife and I gave our oldest son a spare computer we had lying around. This was mainly for homework, but also for some light gaming, like Minecraft and Super Tux Cart. The machine was actually the little home server I built a few years ago.
At 6 years old the motherboard decided to give up the ghost and blew. After talking to him about it, we decided to look for something a bit smaller and cool looking. Originally I was going to go with one of those Raspberry Pi keyboards, but they’re £200 and would likely struggle playing Minecraft.
Then I read about someone loading Linux onto an old Mac with great success (I can’t remember who it was, so can’t provide a link I’m afraid). Anyway, I’ve always loved the look of the old iMacs, so decided to have a peek on eBay for one.
I ended up finding a late-2015 21.5” iMac with 8GB RAM, a 1TB HDD, and a 4th Gen Core i5 processor for £88, delivered!
For that price I wasn’t expecting much. But it looked clean in the pictures, so I decided to take a punt.
Getting the iMac
While waiting for it to arrive, I ordered CPU paste, adhesive strips for resealing the screen, and a RAM upgrade before realising the RAM is soldered on these models, so that was a bust. I also replace the tired old HDD with the 512GB SSD from my son’s previous machine.
I opened it up, replaced the paste, installed the SSD, and sealed it back up. The SSD already had Ubuntu Mate 22.04 on it with all his files and Minecraft maps, so I booted it and let the drivers sort themselves out.
A quick sudo apt update && apt upgrade -y later and everything worked perfectly. I also bumped it to 24.04 while I was there.
Here’s how the new machine looks on his little desk in his bedroom:
Pretty cool, I think you’ll agree.
Performance
Oh lordy, this thing is quick! It boots up in a few seconds, every single app opens pretty much instantly, and he gets a stable 60+ FPS on Minecraft. He’s thrilled with it, and so are we. So much so that we will probably do the same thing again next year when we look to get a machine for our youngest.
Final thoughts
If you’re on the hunt for a new device, I’d seriously consider looking at an Intel Mac with Linux. They’re blazing fast, they look great, and are amazing value.
The only downside is that this window is closing. Apple’s move to the M-series chips means Linux support will be tougher over time. Projects like Asahi Linux exist, but support varies and the long-term outlook is unclear.
For now though, our oldest son has a solid machine that should last him for a few years. If it dies again, I’ll probably look at a Framework 12, but hopefully it won’t come to that.
What do you think about running Linux on older hardware? Would you try something like this? Leave a comment or drop me an email and let me know.